Chronicling the milestones to our most audacious goals

November 25, 2014

Training Tuesdays: Nov 25

Journey to Alpinism requires more than just one man. One of our members on this journey, Matt, will be a regular contributor to our posts. He is also a great photographer and writer. Matt will be contributing to a regular biweekly column we are calling Training Tuesdays. Enjoy!

Hey,

Welcome to Tuesday. My name is Matt and if you’re interested, once every two weeks or so I’m going to write a short post about what I’ve been up to for training to get better at one form or another of climbing. Topics you’ll not see here include:

I’m certainly not a high-end athlete and likely not a middle-end athlete. I’m 31. I work about 50-60 hours a week at two different professional-type jobs that I mostly enjoy, have a girlfriend that tolerates my company and I also like to waste some of my life browsing Reddit and generally having a life. So, I don’t have or want 30 hours a week to train like a professional, which brings me to the reason for creating this little blog-within-a-blog.

In terms of training for climbing, specifically alpine climbing, there aren’t a huge array of resources available to would-be climbers like myself. While it’s inspiring to watch C.T. Fletcher curse at a dumbbell or Sean McColl do so many levers you’d think he has a PHD in Archmedian physics, sometimes I’d like to see what normal people do to achieve normal objectives. So here we are.

Here are some key stats to establish my cred as the normalest of normal guys

Age: 31
Weight: 211 (has been as low as 202 and as high as 280 – me and food don’t get along very well)
Height: 6’2”
Body Fat % as measured at home with plastic calipers and the girlfriend accessory: 30
Max Squat: 225lbs
Max Deadlift: 355lbs
Max Bench 225lbs

I’m planning on using this blog in part to detail my specific training activities, goals and outcomes as well as expand on some of my thoughts regarding nutrition, health and being happy with a balanced (re: compromised) approach to climbing, training and not being a weirdo.

Check back in two Tuesdays. I’ll be writing about my last year or so of getting ‘normal guy serious’ about training to get better at climbing and some of the success I’ve had.